The Current Silence
Took some time out of the office, which means I didn't think about posting here.
I assure you I am alive I have just been staying out of the office since I hurt my finger and playing guitar makes it worse, which sucks but I have been using that time to write massive articles on gamedev with godot and how I do things to be quick and simple. They are super private right now though and in review, draft one.
My wife has been keeping up pretty much able to follow a weeks content in a day. I guess she absorbed some of my weird ways of learning. Throw myself at stuff with a course as a parachute and slamming into it, hit the ground and hopefully the course will have gave me what I need to keep running. That's how all my games got made, I studied pixel art real quick over a weekend and just keep trying to improve.
I picked up Godot through one course and then followed a bunch of other little tutorials I found to get an understanding of the patterns involved in developing with the nodes and singletons. I recommend all game devs have a thorough understanding of all current game design and code patterns.
You can see that I have been busy lately.
This is because I have been writing tons of documentation.
So the code is hidden anyway... it's got a lot of work to do to clean up because it's being used to teach as well as experiment.
There's still hope for Toghairm. I may have some ideas I can use to at least finish it to some degree. It'll be short but I hope to get it done this year. It's better to have horror be short and strong I find. Always preferred horror short compilations to whole horror movies, it's nice to explore more things.
Stella Abbasi
I also am still looking for a good shirt printer. I have had 2 test shirts that can't get to 100 washes when I got old shirts from Shark Robot... oh I think I know. Are they still around?
Anyway I will continue teaching my wife and writing documentation on how the game works for her so that maybe I can release it as a course to help other people one day.
I also got some stuff worked out for my game, some ideas for toghairm, a bunch of pixel art, some more internal office services to support game dev spun up (like AWS-compatable object storage to share large files or folders. Also got my own version of Twitch built, been testing that.
I'll probably be working on the light project later this month. For now though I will be focused on game design and development and teaching it. Better to get her taught so she can start working on her own on some things so I can have time for other things. Also want to do spring cleaning... waiting for the first day I can open the windows again, get all the plastic down and not have to worry about the lizards... seems like that wont be for a couple months but who knows? I'll keep an eye on the weather.
Anyway I gotta get back to building this UI and documenting it.
I also think I will start on the app for Mantilogs this month. For now I will keep playing games in the afternoon, developing them in the morning and hopefully have healed this finger soon so I can get back to guitaring as soon as possible.
Once I get her to the point she can start constructing recipes for her tavern and building the nodes and processors for it without much help from me I can take some time and pick from Mantilogs, My RPG or the complete Jake Light Node Rewrite (Which I somewhat dread but also look forward to... lots of new things gonna happen there, hopefully I know enough about automation and radio communication... and time sync over multiple RTCs on a radio network...)
Anyway, probably no more weed this month. It's going to be interesting. Guess this'll be more data. Things have been mostly fine with or without weed, until I hit a patch of not sleeping... then I get kinda depressed and mean. I try to just play video games and take notes on those days... sometimes those patches last weeks and I get pretty miserable. I will usually employ weed or booze when this happens, though booze is not great... weed has way less negatives short and long term in my experience than alcohol. I can also smoke weed in the morning and be alright to work through the day with writing, drawing, music, etc. Drinking would just trash me if I did it like that. I kinda like remembering previous nights the next morning... especially now that I work basically all day.
Even playing games is work to me, I am playing Elden Ring, picking apart the game design and seeing so much great work here... a lot of my own rules that I picked up over the years are showing here. Especially in the way they reward exploration and the density of the things to do. It's a BIIIIG game but there's nothing empty and boring. It may appear so at first glance but with a little looking around you find all kinds of things you didn't notice at first glance and that's the key to good exploration and adventure game design. The details, the tricks and traps, the things that force you to think differently to solve problems. I can feel all their games I ever played here, from Armored Core on. I can even see some of the stuff I didn't play, like their Wizardry Clone on the PSX. I played a lot of Wizardry but not so much their protosouls games that played very similar.
Anyway, I got work to do like I said.
Cheers.